Where Do You Keep Your Socks In A Video Game?

My friend walked into somebody’s house, saw two beer barrels, and opened them up. Inside one, he found a pair of pants. In the other, there was a paint brush. I believe the homeowner was probably keeping his beer in his sock drawer, or maybe the mailbox.

Video games don’t make a whole lot of sense, do they? In real life, even if you could just wander into people’s homes and take all their stuff without any kind of protest, what you’d find in a beer barrel would probably be, well… beer.

This isn’t true of video games, and hasn’t ever been, as far as I know. In the old SNES Zelda, you could more or less wander around in people’s houses and check all their pots and urns for valuables. If you found any, you could just take them, even if the owner was standing five feet away and watching. That’s not really stealing, is it? I mean, they’d object, surely, if there was a problem.

Now we have the game Oblivion, which came out in 2006. My friend (we’ll call him C.J. for now) was commenting on how strange people’s habits were in the game.

He found one of the characters annoying.

“… so I stole her urn and threw it in the river.”

If life were like video games, we’d go into people’s houses and find urns full of coins, glass bottles full of faeries and beer barrels full of paintbrushes. Nobody would keep pants in a pants drawer or socks in a sock drawer. They’d keep medicine in their grandfather clocks (Final Fantasy VI) and store gold coins in bricks (Super Mario Brothers).

We’d go to work and burn down bushes to try to find secret passages (The Legend of Zelda) or arrange pills (Dr. Mario). At the end of the day we’d put on our raccoon tails and fly home (Super Mario Brothers 3).